Grief
by SJlikeslists
Summary: Loss was something that they all had in common.
1. Skylar

Disclaimer:_ Jericho_ is not mine.

Skylar

Her father was a good man; her mother was a nice woman. She clings to those words in the back of her mind even as she realizes that was has replaced is in the parts of her thoughts that are shoved down so deep that she can still pretend that she does not really have them. She always uses is when she speaks of them out loud. She defends them against any perceived slights with her words; her eyes were practically begging for the acknowledgement from Mrs. Carmichael as they stood negotiating over price in the store.

They have always been nice people. They were always reasonably good parents. They still left her behind. It wasn't just because of the bombs. They had been leaving her behind for a long time before the bombs ever came. There had always been business trips where her presence wasn't needed. There had always been couple's vacations where her presence wasn't wanted. They had things to do. They had places to be, and a child in tow hadn't always been a part of their plans. Being a teenager hadn't made any difference in the number of times in a year that the two of them packed their bags and left without her - it just meant that they no longer left someone to watch her while they were gone.

It wasn't so bad. She hadn't been neglected. It wasn't as if they hadn't wanted her. It was just that they hadn't always wanted her with them. She would pout, they would insist, and she had an entire shelf in her bedroom devoted to souvenirs that were supposed to soothe her wounded feelings and make it up to her that she hadn't been invited along. Pretty, impractical things were brought back as offerings in exchange for the missing time.

That was their pattern - that was their life. She had never known the world any other way. The bombs hadn't taken her parents away (they were always going away); they just stopped them from coming back. It took her a long time to wrap her mind around that. They had always come back before. There had been one time when she was five that their return flight had been cancelled because of bad weather. She remembered that one clearly because it had been two days before her sixth birthday.

There had been a conference or something of the sort, and her mother had gone with her father just as she always had done. They had called and talked to her babysitter first before she had demanded that the phone be given to her. She had been placated by her mother's reassurance that they were coming home soon - they were just going to be a little late. They had finally arrived at nearly ten at night on her birthday. She had been awake and plastered to the window - nothing that the name now forgotten babysitter had said being able to prevail upon her to leave her vigil. They had promised not to miss her birthday, and they, technically, hadn't.

She spent the initial days while everyone else was coming to terms with the fact that a nuclear bomb had gone off in that same haze of vigil keeping. She had been that little girl again refusing to listen to anything or anybody waiting for the first glimpse of her parents coming home.

It hadn't worked this time, and it had left her angry. There were no gift bearing parents each morning when she woke. There were no apologizing for being late parents slipping into her room at night when she tried to go to sleep. There was no souvenir to add to her shelf. There was no mother to tell her that pouting was unattractive. There was no father to tell her that there best have been no boys about while he was away. There was just nothing. There was just no one. That was wrong - there was Dale.

He was always looking at her, and she hated it. It made her angry and irritated and she wanted to scream at him at the top of her lungs to just quit looking at her. He knew. She could handle anyone in the whole stupid town looking at her except for him because when he looked at her she just knew that he knew. He was seeing all the things that she wasn't saying. He was seeing all the things that she would never, ever say out loud. How could he not? He'd been left behind too.

She sold her mother's jewelry box and regretted it the moment she walked out of the store - not because she hadn't wanted to get rid of it. She was angry enough by then that she wanted some way, any way to strike back at the parents she couldn't yell at, couldn't give the silent treatment to, and couldn't even see any more. She regretted it because she had seen the little self-satisfied smirk that Gracie Leigh had tried to hide as she turned to walk away, and she knew what the old bat was thinking.

She always knew what that woman was thinking - Mrs. Leigh had never taken much trouble to hide the fact that she thought she was a spoiled brat. She, in turn, had never taken much trouble to hide the fact that she thought Mrs. Leigh was an overbearing busybody who overcharged for second rate junk - but the trials of finding durable lip gloss in the near to negligible selection of the older woman's shop were a thing of the past. The fact that Mrs. Leigh thought she was a spoiled brat who was throwing away family heirlooms because she had no sense of their value was a thing of the present, and it grated on her nerves that the woman presumed to know anything about her - that she thought she was stupid annoyed her; that she thought that she was actually naive enough to think that a case of soda for one of her mother's prized possessions was anything like to a fair trade was irritating.

A part of her fully expected her mother to be waiting in their living room when she got home to chew her out. That didn't work either. Nothing worked, but she didn't know for sure. She didn't know anything for sure. They might be dead; they might be on their way back. She might never know one way or the other what had happened to them. She didn't think that Dale would see it that way, but there were days when she felt like he was lucky because he, at least, knew. He wasn't waiting for someone who might never be coming back. He wasn't teetering back and forth between being hopeful that they were coming, being petrified that they weren't, and being angry that they were taking so long.

Some days she wondered why they had never thought ahead far enough to make any plans. People could say all they wanted about how no one could have seen the bombs coming, but her parents had been travelers. They were always going somewhere, and they were always going together. Planes used to crash, drunk drivers used to hit people, and a hundred other things had always been possibilities that had apparently never occurred to them. There was never any mention of guardians, she never found any papers, and no one ever came to her to say that her parents had asked them to look out for her.

Her mother had said to her the week before they left that she was sixteen not twenty seven, and she needed to remember that. That was ironic since her parents didn't seem to have bothered to remember that. Either they had never bothered to make arrangements, or whomever they had made arrangements with had left her behind as well.

That was the real reason she had asked Dale to take her with him the first time he had gone off to try to enforce the contracts for the store. She didn't want to be left behind. She was tired of being left behind. She had almost cried when he got into the car for the trading trip at the fairgrounds, but she had held the tears back. She was still a Stevens, and public breakdowns weren't their style. She wasn't going to be clingy. She wasn't going to beg to be included in trips where her presence wasn't required. She had already learned that lesson; she had been learning that lesson all her life. It didn't work. It didn't get you included. It didn't ensure that the people leaving you would be coming back again.

She knew that, and Dale knew that - even though they never said the words out loud. They didn't need to say the words out loud. Dale knew being left, she knew being left, and maybe that's why the two of them worked so well.


	2. Gail

Gail

She hadn't had enough time. That was the thought that seemed to be on an endless loop whenever she slowed down enough to allow herself to breathe. It wasn't a rational complaint. She knew that it wouldn't have mattered how long she had had; she would never have believed that she had had enough time. She would never have been ready. There was no such thing as ready - not for her. She wasn't ready to be a widow. She wasn't ready to have him gone. She wasn't ready for goodbyes.

It felt like she had just made it through the flu scare from the previous fall. Nothing had been settled since. There had been April and Eric leaving and mortars raining down in the middle of her town, and she hadn't even managed to really comprehend that her home was about to be the middle of a war zone. She hadn't had enough time. There hadn't been enough time to process. There hadn't been enough time to get her footing or regain her equilibrium. There hadn't been enough time for a lot of things - not the least of which was to be married to that man that got her dander up and made her shiver and was the best friend that she could ever dream of having. There hadn't been enough time to see her wayward son and his father make their peace. There hadn't been enough time for anything, and she was all out of time and watching a seemingly endless space of time stretch out in front of her all at once.

There were so many things that they had said that they would do later. There were trips that they had never taken. There were things that they had never gotten around to doing. It had always been later - after the next election, after the children were older, after the children were settled, after things were back in order after the bombs, after something, after anything. After, later, and next time were words that were going to haunt her for the rest of her life. Those afters had all disappeared from her possibilities now. She had a new after with which to reconcile herself - after him.

She had never planned on there being an after him. She had never wanted there to be an after him. She didn't know how to be in an after him. What did one do with the huge hole in one's life where a spouse used to be? What did one use to fill up the place that had been confidant, best friend, sometimes antagonist, lover, father of one's children, and the thousands of other roles never named but always provided by the person one was supposed to move on without? Where did one even start? She didn't know. She wasn't entirely certain that she even wanted to know. She wasn't ready. She wasn't ready to fill in empty places. She wasn't ready to try. She wasn't ready to learn how it was done.

She had children who needed her. Someone had said that to her in the immediate aftermath. She couldn't recall which of the indistinguishable voices it had been. She didn't particularly care. She hadn't cared for the sentiment. Her boys were adults. They had their own grieving to do. They had their own paths forward to figure out. She wasn't in a place to do the pulling and grieving and figuring for them. Relearning her boys was just another thing on the list of things for which she was not ready.

She had always been the bridge between Johnston and Jake. Johnston had always been the bridge between her and Eric. There were no more bridges. There were just the three of them needing to try to understand how they all related to each other without either the buffer or the reason for the buffer being present any longer. She needed time before she tried that. They needed time before they tried that, and time was the one thing that none of them were getting as long as she stayed in the house.

That she wasn't ready to stay there was the excuse that she had given (inwardly giving a sardonic chuckle at finally being able to voice the words in some context). She didn't elaborate. They didn't ask. They thought that they knew what she meant. They thought that she wasn't ready to be in a place that had been so central to their lives without him. What she wasn't ready for was to stay in the house with them hovering over her reminding her that she was without him. She needed space. They ought to be able to give her that. She had been handing it out to the men in her life as needed for decades.

Jake had always demanded space by leaps and bounds. Eric had taken his more quietly, but he had taken it just the same. Johnston had had his do not disturb facets of his life, and she had always allowed them their space when space was what they had actually needed. She would be the first to admit that she hadn't always been the epitome of graciousness on all occasions, but she wasn't asking for gracious from her family these days. She just wanted them to give her time on her own. They could complain and register objections all they wanted - just so long as they did it out of her hearing.

She wasn't ready, but she had to learn how to breathe again. Doing otherwise wasn't an option. She had her boys, and she had her after. She just couldn't learn how to function with her every step dogged with reminders of what it was that she was doing and why it was that she had to be doing it. She wanted to take her time and be in their home and remember what it felt like to have him with her before she learned the new feel of the nots - not their home, not their life, not any their to be found.

They wouldn't let her. They weren't being deliberately unhelpful. Another person might have appreciated the attention. Another person might have been grateful for the company. Another person might have wanted to share all of the details of rearranging a life to accommodate such a drastic change. She wasn't another person. She was her. She didn't want the attention. She didn't want the company. She didn't want to share all the details, and she (more than anything) didn't want to answer one more person when they claimed that they wanted to know how she felt.

She tried the ranch. It worked for a bit. She had more space. She wasn't under constant observation. She could dredge up her memories and revel in them for a while. She could be at peace with her knowledge of her husband and what he would have done and what he would have said. She could close her eyes and call up the sound of his voice and relive moments and make up new ones and take her time to reconcile herself to the reality of this being what she was left with in the new after that was never supposed to have been.

It ended up being too close. It was too easy for them to come by to check on her. It was too easy for them to stick around when they did. She wasn't trying to be unreasonable. She wasn't trying to make them feel unwelcome. She just hadn't been given enough time - that was the now reoccurring theme of her life. She didn't want to talk about what she was thinking. She didn't want to talk about what she was feeling. If they could have talked to her about anything else at all, she would have been happy to see them. But, it seemed that they were too stuck in a rut of not being able to see beyond their own expectations of what their obligations should be to recognize what it was that she really needed. She couldn't talk about what she was thinking and feeling when she didn't know yet what it was that she was thinking and feeling.

When everything in the vicinity was officially under control enough for travel to be considered "safe," she jumped at the chance to go and stay for a bit with other relatives. A part of her felt guilty for leaving when she could see how much both of her boys were still struggling and floundering with their new realities (they couldn't hide it from her, not even cloaked in the attempts to focus on her visits they insisted on making). She shook it off and went anyway. She wasn't ready, and her boys were going to need her to be. She knew that. She needed space to work through everything at her own pace, or she was never going to be able to be there for them. She would do what she had to do even if it meant walking away.


	3. Emily

Emily

She had always had an affinity for putting things in boxes. There had been an old shoe box when she was very little where she stuffed in everything that was most important to her each night before she went to bed. That way, if it was one of the bad nights, she would only need to remember the box and everything would be okay. If the yelling got out of hand and her mom pulled her out of bed to leave again, then she could grab her box as they went. She had learned to depend on her box after one too many times of finding herself on her aunt's doorstep in the middle of the night in her pajamas with nothing else that was hers to hold onto until they inevitably went back.

In her head, boxes represented security. You could tuck things away in boxes and know that they would be right there waiting for you whenever you needed to go looking for them. Beyond that, boxes were practical. It did not matter what type of mess and disorder reigned in the interior of a box. As long as you could still close the lid, no one else would ever know. There could be complete chaos. There could be tangles and unsorted piles. There could be mix ups and things that should not have been kept. There could be things that you wanted carefully hidden. All anyone else would see was the smooth, carefully polished facade of an equally carefully stacked set of boxes. Boxes covered a multitude of failings. They let you determine what others could or could not see. They let you decide what (and with whom) you would or would not share. Emily functioned best when she could sort her life into boxes. She liked them, wanted them, and needed them even.

Problems arose when the people around her tried to climb out of the boxes into which they had been sorted. Papers and pictures stayed put. People, sometimes, did not. She did not like that. It messed with her system. Messing with her system ruffled her. She did not like to be ruffled. It was like shoving the metaphorical lid off the box that was Emily and offering a crack through which people could peek at the contents within all of their unpolished glory instead of at the careful neatness of the outside container. That was not acceptable. It had to be fixed as quickly as possible, so she fought to keep the people around her in the boxes where they belonged. She pushed at them to make them go back. Failing that, she kept pushing them right out of her life. It was better that way. There was no place in her life for pieces that had nowhere to fit. She had no place in her for pieces that would not stay in the spot that she wanted them to be. It was work (and sometimes it was hard), but she had no foundation for any other way to try to be.

When Roger had made his appearance in her life, he had been the perfect fit to a box that she had assembled in her head as she packed away all of her remembrances of her brother. She wanted things that made it clear that the woman who had lived the life that ended up the way that it did was behind her. Roger was everything she wanted her life to become.

He was a clean slate. There were not years of expectations unfulfilled and recollections of missteps standing between them. They took trips and they laughed together and they lived in the moment and only looked forward instead of always being tied to ghosts of the past. Roger was the happily ever after box. He was the house in the Pines that she had stared at as a little girl. He was the normal man with the normal job who would be able to help her build a normal family - the kind where you could ask about someone's day or job or where they had been the night before and not get yelled at for prying or find yourself avoiding eye contact because you knew that you were being lied to when they answered you.

Roger was attentive. He made plans, and she was at the center of them. He thought about the future as something beyond the next Saturday night or some sort of a vague someday. He committed to things and followed through with them. Roger was dependable. He was solid. He was a box where everything on the inside looked just as finished and orderly as it did on the outside.

Then, everything went wrong. Bombs detonated around the country and shattered everything.

Her boxes crumbled all around her and none of the pieces had places to go. She was left reeling. She was left lost. She needed her boxes.

She had lost Roger, she had lost her life plan, and the only box that was pushing itself forward to be used was the one that held Jake. She did not want the box that held Jake. She had put the box that held Jake away - shoved it somewhere behind the contents of the life that she wanted and hidden out of sight and out of mind. The box that held Jake was labeled with warnings and accusations and covered with caution tape that read unreliable and destruction causing. She wanted the Jake box to go away, but it felt like every time that she turned around there it was shoving itself to the front again. And with the Jake box came the Jonah box and with both of them came a crack in the tape that she had used to seal shut the box that was Chris.

She was in mourning again, and mourning was something which she had never dealt with well. This new round of mourning was no exception. She was angry; she was confused. She lashed out; she closed herself off. She tried drinking; she tried solitude. She tried working; she tried volunteering. Nothing worked. Her boxes were still all popping open and spilling out their contents leaving everything in chaos and confusion.

She was losing who she had worked so hard to make herself to be.

She tried shoving things back in their places, but that was not working either. Roger was gone, and all the things that belonged in the Roger box taunted her with that fact. And then there was Jake. She did not know how to deal with a Jake who was doing things and being someone who did not match the labels that she had wrapped around his box. Jake was not the hero. Jake was not the fixer. Jake was not the person with a plan; he was not dependable. He could not be relied on; he could not be trusted. But the pieces would not fit any longer. She could not force him back into his box.

She could not make anything go back in their boxes. She got a little reckless; she could see that from the perspective of later, but she still did not think that stealing what Jonah had already stolen had been a poor idea. It was a little reckless; it was a little of the Emily who used to be who was supposed to be packed carefully away, but it was not a bad idea. It had worked, hadn't it? She had been in desperate need of something working the way that she knew that it should.

With everything inside her head lost in disorder and forced reconfiguring, it would have been nice to have someone outside of her head that she could talk through the chaos with to try to regain her bearings. That was something also denied to her by the new reality into which she was being pushed. There was no Roger. There was only the missing space where Roger had been. She could not cry on his shoulder. She could not talk to him. Mary was preoccupied, and Heather just did not understand. Mary had her own problems and concerns taking up her attention. Heather was a doer and a fixer, but no one but Emily could fix the mess inside her head. She just could not seem to make any progress, and when she thought that she had wrenched something back into the place where it belonged, some other box would shift out of place and come crashing down on her head.

And the box labeled Jake just would not go away. It would not stay where it belonged. It would not close. It would not hold the things she wanted to place inside it, and things she did not want kept pushing themselves under her notice. She could not get away from him. He was everywhere it seemed, and so were the memories that she did not want to remember.

She needed something to change, and the longer the disorder of the outside world went on, the more it felt as if what would have to change was her boxes and how they were organized. The reorganization would have to begin with Jake.


	4. April

April

She hates thinking about the way he looked at her - like she had disappointed him somehow. He had no right to look at her like that. She hates the way that he made her feel. She hates that he had enough power over her to make her feel like that. All that time when she tried to talk to him, tried to walk or eat with him, and he acted like she was out of bounds and causing him annoyance - as if her wanting to work things out inconvenienced him. Only it had inconvenienced him, hadn't it? Her trying did make his life difficult. Her caring was an inconvenience. She hated looking back at the day of the fire. She hated the way he had spoken to her when he found the papers - all understanding and considerate and making her feel like she needed to apologize for not having worked harder and done something, anything different to have prevented their deterioration or chosen another route than even considering requesting that the papers be drawn up.

She wonders sometimes if he was actually breathing a sigh of relief. She wonders if he was snickering at her behind her back about how she had handed him the opportunity to walk away as the injured, put upon party whose wife had been the one who had done the leaving. Mostly, she hated that she thought like that. She hated that she had lost Eric - not the man who flitted from place to place tackling crisis after crisis and scurrying off to sooth his troubles not in the bar itself but in the bartender. She hated that she had lost her Eric. She missed the man that she had married. She missed the man who had been her best friend. She missed the man that she could tell what she was thinking only to discover that he already had a pretty good idea. She missed being able to read him.

She wondered when, exactly, they had lost that. She wondered, at times, if she hadn't actually lost that because she found herself questioning whether or not it had actually ever existed. Had he really been the best friend that she thought he had been? Had she ever really been his? Had they really ever known each other so well? Had they ever been as happy as she thought they had been? If they had, then why could she not figure out where it had all gone wrong? Had it really been their schedules? There had been distance. She knew that. She knew that they talked less. She knew that there was less sharing. She knew that there had been days when things didn't mesh with her hours and his hours and they didn't even speak. Was that really all it took for everything to fall apart? Or had there been nothing there to fall apart from the beginning?

She hated that she had lost that certainty of who they had been. She hated that she had lost those memories due to the taint of doubt. What would she tell the baby one day when she (she just knew it was a she even though there was no way to know for sure) was all grown up and wanted to know the details of why her parents hadn't worked? She didn't know because she didn't have those answers for herself.

She hated pregnancy hormones whenever she tried to sort out what she was thinking and feeling about Eric and the situation. They clouded everything and made her so emotional that she couldn't sort things out (at least she was choosing to blame the hormones).

She was so angry sometimes when she thought of Mary that she wanted to shriek and throw things and sob - none of which she could do because those actions weren't things that were allowed from a woman who was always being watched to see how she was holding up. She wondered if Mary ever felt the same when she thought about her. She wondered if Mary ever had the same thoughts about what Eric had done to them that she did. Did she ever pause to consider the timing? Did she ever think about the fact that Eric had been having sex with both of them at the same time? Did she wonder what he had to have thought about the both of them to be able to go through with that? Or was she the only one who thought of that? Was she the only one who was shattered over the idea of her husband being a cheater and a liar who had gone out and taken up with another woman while he still kept her (his wife) what? On the side? Was that what she had been? Or was that what Mary had been? Or had they both been on the sidelines of Eric's life while the center was firmly kept on Eric keeping his options open?

Five years ago, four, three, two, one even - she would never have listened to anyone cast aspersions on her husband's character the way she did in her own head on a daily basis now. She hated that she had lost that. She hated that she had lost her ability to trust. Here she was effectively cut off from the means of going to her own family, and she had to trust that Eric's would be the ones to help her. It wasn't that she didn't believe that Johnston and Gail would do whatever they could to help her with the baby (and she wasn't nearly naive enough to believe that the world she currently inhabited was one where she should attempt to go through a pregnancy and care for an infant on her own), but she did resent that that was the way that things had fallen out.

Mostly, she resented that she had to be the one who lived with the tension everyone else felt about her and Eric while he got to go off and play house in the stress free zone.

She worked because that was one of the very few things that she hadn't really lost. She was a doctor. There was a time when she would have referred to herself as a good doctor, but the loss of so many of the things that she had learned to be a doctor with had made her reevaluate her assessment to being an adequate doctor who tried really hard. That was refreshing. It was nice to have some place to go and something to do where it mattered if she tried - where her trying could actually make a difference.

It hadn't with Eric. It didn't with the interfamily relationships throughout the house where she slept at night (living wasn't a word that she was willing to use right now). Her trying didn't make any difference in the bigger scale disaster all around her, but it might make a difference to individuals who wandered through the doors of her clinic. She savored that, and she found herself staying longer and longer in consequence. It wasn't as if there was ever a break in the work to be completed there. There was always plenty to do. No one could ever complain that she wasn't needed or wanted within those walls (although Gail did her level best to try to get her to do a little less, stay a little less, and rest a little more).

She didn't really know how to rest anymore. She could make her body be still, but she couldn't make her mind be quiet - and she didn't want to keep thinking the same circular thoughts about Eric that were always waiting for another round.

Her best resting happened in the chair at her desk despite her mother-in-law's assertion that it wasn't the proper place for a nap. She could be still there for a few moments knowing that everyone would know where to find her if something needing her immediate attention occurred. It wasn't an Eric place, so it was easier to not think of now tainted memories when it wasn't a place where any of them had occurred. She could sit, and she could lay her hand over the slight swell that marked where the baby was growing. She could whisper things to her little one, and she could promise her that everything would be okay - that she had a grandma and grandpa that were going to do everything they could to spoil her, that her mother loved her and would never leave her all alone and never make her question what was wrong with her that someone would want to leave, and that her Uncle Jake was a little crazy but was turning into someone that would make sure she was safe.

She never whispered to the baby (Tracy she called her) about her daddy. She never told her anything bad about him. She didn't whisper any of her doubts. She wasn't going to undermine even in utero, but she wasn't going to raise the baby's hopes (or hers either) with promises that might not be kept. She wasn't going to promise that her daddy would be there for her; she wasn't going to promise that her daddy would keep his word. She was too close to the knowledge that he broke promises and vows. She was too close to the knowledge that he could lie all too easily.


	5. Darcy

Darcy

Darcy Hawkins was no stranger to sudden changes. She had thought that she was actually rather a pro at learning to move beyond them. She had, after all, had them thrust into her life before.

There had been a time when things were very different. There had been a time when she had been very different. She had been a married woman once. She had been a married woman with two children who thought that she knew where her life was and where it would be going. She had a safe happy little world where she had been concerned about her husband's job once, but she knew that he had gotten his priorities ironed out. She had known that he had made his choices and the children and herself were what those choices were. He was with them. He was committed to them. He wasn't going to get so count up in his earning a living that he wasn't living with them. She had known that that was where he and they and her life had stood.

She had been wrong about that. She had been so very, very wrong. She had been wrong about his priorities and wrong about him. She had been wrong about her life being safe; she had been wrong about her happy little world. She had even been wrong about just how solidly she had been married, and it had all come crashing down around her. She had lost that life and all of the thinking that had gone along with it.

The husband had gone away one day with no warning beyond a visit from a nebulous "someone from work." He had become nothing more than a voice over the phone that spent a few hurried moments checking in with or on the children. The calls had gotten shorter and shorter and farther and farther apart very quickly until they had ceased altogether taking with them any semblance of her husband's presence in her life and any concept that her children had of having a "dad."

The children had coped with it differently - partly because of underlying personality differences and partly because of the difference in their ages. One of her children had pretended to be tough and untouched by the change. She had tried to grow up too quickly to help fill in the gap that was left by his absence. The other one had regressed into a shy, hesitant figure that was afraid of being left behind. He cried out from nightmares that he couldn't verbalize and asked her over and over what he had done that was bad. That was the new normal for her children. That was her new life, and she learned to survive it. Later, she learned how to live it.

She learned to be a working full time and then some single parent and did her best to balance her need for more hours at work with the time with her her children needed (and knew that more often than not she did not succeed in finding that balance). Her daughter settled into her help out role, but she gradually became a little less grown up and remembered how to be the child instead of the partner. Her son got comfortable again and learned to be less clingy. They leveled off and moved forward. She leveled off and moved forward. They made their new life work, and they learned to be happy in it. The three of them had each other, and they left behind the way they had worked as a family when there had been four of them instead. It had not been easy. It had not been fun, but they made do because that was what you did. You kept going, and you kept the children going right along with you.

You figured out the balance as best as you could. You learned to like your new life as it was. You made your new plans for how your life would go, and you got yourself and your family on the appropriate tracks to make them happen. She learned to have breathing room again. She learned to look around her again, and she learned to notice the other people around her instead of focusing always on nothing but the kids. She started to think that maybe, just maybe, there might be space in the new way things were for her to be a wife again. She was not ready for that (she was nowhere near ready for that), but she was ready to think of it being a possibility. She was ready to let herself wonder. She was ready to let herself have a few dreams of maybes and could bes and might let its in her life.

Then, Rob came back - just like that. There was no warning. There was no reason to expect him. He was just there - not to ask for something (a chance to see the kids, to find out how they were, something that would have been unwelcome but would have at least made sense) but to make demands of the three of them. He was there to give orders. He was there to issue declarations. He expected them to just do as they were told. He expected them to go along with it and not ask him any questions.

There had been years of nothing - no visits, no phone calls, and no word from the man. They had gone from nothing to being expected to take orders in the matter of minutes, and the man honestly believed that they would be happy to be kidnapped by the man who claimed the title of husband and father but was really just the man who had left them all behind. She had honestly thought, at the very start in that truck, that her children were going to go from no contact to watching him be committed. With the way that he was acting, what other than delusional could he possibly be?

She had been wrong again.

Her life was lost again. There was, quite literally, no life to which they could go back. It was all gone - the places and the people. They were only not gone with it because Rob had suddenly decided that they were his. As if time had somehow stopped for him in all the years in which he had been gone, and he had lost sight of the fact that he was not her husband any more. He was not the kids' dad anymore for all that he was their father, and he truly did not seem to grasp the whys of their reluctance or the cause of their resistance. It was disturbing and frustrating, and there were times when she thought they might all be better off if she knocked him in the head while he slept.

There were a couple of times when she considered the possibility, but she always put the thoughts aside (less because of a belief that the action might not be the best course and more because she didn't believe that Rob would actually allow himself to be snuck up upon). Her other life was lost, so she had to learn to live the one she had. She had done it before. She could do it again. It would not be pleasant. It would not be enjoyable. It still had to be done, and she would have to bring the kids through it with her again.

She almost laughed out loud when Rob brought Sarah home. She knew how to read between the lines, and she knew exactly what she was seeing. It was interesting that Rob had been so determined to come for his family before the bombs went off when he hadn't given enough of a thought to the children to even bother with cursory checks on them and had obviously replaced her with a coworker. She didn't bother to think too much about it. It was as much a part of a past that no longer existed as Doug and the boy that Ally had been waiting to ask her out and the little boy next door that had played with Sam in the backyard on Saturday mornings.

In this new life, Sarah only mattered as the source of a potential threat. If Rob wanted what he claimed he wanted, he would take appropriate actions in response to that. He owed them that. The things that she said to him about that woman were things that would never have come out of her mouth in one of those long ago lives that she had lost and moved on from - things were different now. She had lost her sense of the bigger picture somewhere in the ether when the smoke from the blasts had cleared. The only things that mattered were the ones that touched her family on a personal level, the things that kept them safe, and the things that kept the children fed and warm. Everything else was extraneous. Everyone else was extraneous. That was all that she was sure of now.


End file.
